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Talk about wealth!

It's never easy to catch Mother Culture in her lies
- even for me, with all my practice. She teaches that the way
we live is the only human way to live, and thinking about
other ways is an utter waste of time. The characteristic that
Mother Culture attaches to the Leaver lifestyle most predominantly
is absence. Leavers lack technology (untrue, but
no matter), lack history (what they have is merely prehistory),
lack the noble institutions of civilization, lack the opportunities
for wealth and luxury that we enjoy. The last of these is one
of the trickiest of Mother Culture's deceptions, because at first
glance it seems unarguable. Even very modest Taker households
boast amenities that would seem miraculous to our ancient ancestors
and that would still seem so to Leaver peoples not yet in contact
with our culture. In this light, it's easy to accept the idea
that the Taker way is the way of wealth and the Leaver way is
the way of poverty.

The answering trick to Mother Culture's trick is
almost always this: When she holds up a picture of Nothing, look
for Something. When she holds up a picture of an Absence, look
for a Presence.

The Leaver way is not a way of poverty, it's a way
of wealth -- but the wealth of the Leaver way isn't the wealth
of products, it's the wealth of human support. Mother Culture
never has names for things she cannot see, and there is no name
in English (or any other language I know) for this support. It's
not comraderie or friendship or neighborliness. It's motivating
origins are not to be found in love or charity or kindliness.
In Leaver societies, people look after each other for much the
same reasons that people in Taker societies take jobs and have
careers. In Leaver societies, people look after one another not
because they're saintly but because looking after one another
assures that they themselves will be looked after. If they don't
look after one another, then the community disappears -- and no
one is looked after.

When the members of Family A fall ill, Families B,
C, and D share their food with them, because they all know that
someday they too could fall ill. When a child is injured, the
nearest adult runs to help it, because that adult knows that someday
his or her own child may need help. When an aged person becomes
sick and helpless, the family of that person isn't alone with
the problem. All share the burden, because all know they will
have a similar burden someday and will need others to share it.
Those who give support shall receive support.

It's an economy. An economy based on support instead
of products. It works like the diagram to the right...

The Taker economy, by contrast, works like that on the left...

Everyone knows the Taker economy works, but they
find it hard to believe that the Leaver economy works too. This
is because Taker wealth is so much more visible than Leaver wealth.
Products can be photographed, packaged, and put in store windows,
but support can't. There are many other striking differences between
these two kinds of wealth.

Taker wealth can be put under lock and key, but Leaver
wealth can't. For this reason, Taker wealth is inherently divisive.
Behind the locked doors of my house are my furniture, my
appliances, my television sets, my radios, my
computers, my clothes, my records, my books.
I've worked for them, I've earned them, and no one
else in the world has worked for them or earned them -- and this
is the dividing line between them and me, between theirs and mine.
The law of every Taker nation in the world confirms all this.
Leaver wealth, by contrast, is not divisive but inherently unitive.

Taker and Leaver economies are mirror images of each
other. Takers are rich in products but poor in human support;
Leavers are rich in human support but poor in products. But note
this: Takers complain noisily and endlessly over the shortcomings
of their economic system, but anthropologists find that Leavers
(until their cultures are undermined by Taker contact) seem remarkably
content with theirs.

Ever wish you were as secure as a baboon?

The experience of Leavers as one of cradle-to-grave
security. This security is not the result of utopian design or
nobility of character. It's the result of eons of evolutionary
shaping of their communities. In brief, community structures that
did not provide cradle-to-grave security for their members did
not survive. The structures we know are the ones that survived.
They're like the species we know: They survived because they worked.

Many readers may wonder if this "cradle-to-grave
security" isn't an exaggeration I indulge in for the sake of
making a point. Not so, I assure you. In fact, there's little
reason to be surprised that Leaver peoples should enjoy such security.
After all, among our neighbors in the community of life, the very
same security is enjoyed in every species whose members form communities.
Ducks, sea lions, deer, giraffes, wolves, wasps, monkeys, and
gorillas (to name just a few species out of millions) enjoy such
security. It has to be assumed that the members of Homo habilis
enjoyed such security -- or how would they have survived? Is
there any reason to doubt that the members of Homo erectus
enjoyed such security or that they conferred it upon their
descendants, Homo sapiens?

No, as a species, we came into being in communities
in which cradle-to-grave security was the rule, and the same rule
has been followed throughout the development of Homo sapiens
right up to the present moment -- in Leaver societies. It's
only in Taker societies that cradle-to-grave security has become
a rarity, a special blessing of the privileged few.

In Taker societies, needed support is provided by
paid ''professional classes'' of support-givers. If your mother
becomes ill, for example, your community doesn't rally round to
share the burden of her care. You have to pay people to do that,
and the more you spend, the better your mother is cared for and
the less heavy your personal burden is. The same is true of any
condition that could be alleviated by human support. In Leaver
societies, this support is available to everyone in the community,
automatically, free of charge. In Taker societies, you pay for
it or you don't get it. And, my oh my, do we ever pay for it!

I haven't the time or inclination for such research,
but it would be fascinating to know how much it costs us to get
all the support that is free in Leaver societies. Virtually all
services for which we pay taxes are provided for free by members
of Leaver societies as an ordinary part of belonging to the community,
and they don't find it especially burdensome to provide them.
''Professional classes'' of support-givers are nonexistent or
very small; most shamans, for example, do not ''make their living''
by healing or by performing religious ceremonies, and most tribal
chiefs do not ''make their living'' as political leaders.

People sometimes ask if it wouldn't be possible to
achieve the Leaver lifestyle simply by leaping out of the Taker
lifestyle into nothing. The answer is no, because the Leaver lifestyle
isn't nothing, it's an economy -- an economy based on a different
sort of wealth and on a different sort of economic transaction:
not products for products but support for support.

If you'd like to explore the possibility of moving
toward a Leaver lifestyle in your community, don't concentrate
on giving up Taker things. To concentrate on giving up Taker things
is to concentrate on a negative. The Leaver lifestyle isn't an
absence of Taker things, it's a presence of something else, and
that presence is support.

I've conjectured that we can reinvent Leaver-style
support systems for ourselves incrementally, bit by bit, by working
within our own communities and building on each other's successes
the way inventors of the Industrial Revolution built on each other's
successes. I've received a lot of encouragement for this idea,
but as yet no one has reported trying it. I suspect the
idea of offering any kind of support to anyone makes people very
nervous. That's fine. Don't start by offering anything. Start
by bringing out into the open the fears and reservations you have
about the whole idea. That's progress, because it's a start.